XPost: alt.los-angeles, alt.society.liberalism, alt.politics.democrats.d   
   XPost: talk.politics.misc   
   From: rkoch@banmlkday.com   
      
   In her new best-seller Ann Coulter breaks with the politically   
   correct history of the civil rights movement by openly   
   criticizing Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.   
      
   The always provocative Coulter makes the case that King’s   
   embrace of mass street protests, specifically breaking the law   
   by staging marches without permits and gaining public sympathy   
   by purposely putting children in the way of vicious dogs and   
   blasts from power water hoses used by rabid segregationists, is   
   a prime example of how liberals throughout history get their way   
   by using angry, inflammatory mob behavior.   
      
   Coulter writes in her book “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is   
   Endangering America,” that “Martin Luther King Jr. ...used   
   images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause,   
   deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent   
   confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’   
   Connor,” the Birmingham sheriff who was known to be easily   
   provoked to brutality and violence to enforce racial segregation.   
      
   She spoke with me as she was writing because I am the author of   
   several books on the civil rights movement, including “Eyes on   
   the Prize – America’s Civil Rights Years.” And she uses   
   quotations from my best-selling biography of Thurgood Marshall,   
   the liberal legal giant who became first black justice of the   
   U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall, like Coulter, was a critic of   
   King’s tactics.   
      
   “Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling   
   him an ‘opportunist’ and ‘first rate rabble-rouser,’” Coulter   
   argues in her book. “Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion   
   that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall   
   replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not   
   be entrusted to children. King, he said, was ‘a boy on a man’s   
   errand.’”   
      
   You have to give Coulter points for shrewdly using the words of   
   one black liberal civil rights icon to indict another liberal   
   black liberal civil rights icon. She has a conservative agenda   
   and she is a world-class provocateur who knows how to inflame   
   her liberal critics.   
      
   Coulter and I disagree most of the time, especially on her   
   regular use of harsh, partisan hyperbolic language to caricature   
   people. Her tirades against liberals get lots of media attention   
   and sell books but they overshadow the serious insights she has   
   into American history. And when Ann is right, Ann can be   
   devastatingly right.   
      
   In any case, Marshall worked to achieve racial equality by   
   ending laws that discriminated against Americans in schools, in   
   playgrounds, housing, on juries and at work. And he told me over   
   the course of months of interviews of his differences with King.   
   “I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his the   
   theory.”   
      
   Marshall said in one interview as we discussed King’s street   
   protest tactics. “I didn’t believe in that. I thought you had   
   the right to disobey the law and you have the right to go to   
   jail for it.” In the same interview, Marshall conceded that King   
   had tremendous influence. “He came up at the right time,” he   
   said. “I think he was great – as a leader. As an organizer, he   
   wasn’t worth s—t..He was a great speaker...but as for getting   
   the work done, he was not too good at that…All he did was dump   
   all his legal work on us (the NAACP) including the bills. And   
   that was all right with him so long as he didn’t have to pay the   
   bills.”   
      
   In those interviews I learned that there were times when   
   Marshall deeply resented King’s fame – particularly when Martin   
   Luther King Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.   
      
   The left often has a simplistic view of the civil rights   
   movement as monolithic. The truth is that Marshall and King   
   represented very different approaches to ending the bitter   
   history of segregation. Marshall favored using the law while   
   King favored bold demonstrations to gain media attention.   
      
   History tells us that both the demonstrators and the lawyers   
   played vital roles in bringing about the end of segregation in   
   America. But Marshall’s more conservative view of how to create   
   lasting social change is often forgotten because he never wore a   
   dashiki or patronized the idea of race riots as helpful to   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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